by Philip Kerr
‘I must be going,’ he said. Taking out a notebook he started to write on a piece of paper. ‘If you do change your mind you can reach me at this number in Karlshorst. That’s 55-16-44. Ask for General Kaverntsev’s Special Security Section. And there’s my home telephone number as well: 05-00-19.’
Poroshin smiled and nodded at the note as I took it from him. ‘If you should be arrested by the Americans, I wouldn’t let them see that if I were you. They’ll probably think you’re a spy.’
He was still laughing about that as he went down the stairs.
5
For those who had believed in the Fatherland, it was not the defeat which gave the lie to that patriarchal view of society, but the rebuilding. And with the example of Berlin, ruined by the vanity of men, could be learned the lesson that when a war has been fought, when the soldiers are dead and the walls are destroyed, a city consists of its women.
I walked towards a grey granite canyon which might have concealed a heavily worked mine, from where a short train of brick-laden trucks was even now emerging under the supervision of a group of rubble-women. On the side of one of their trucks was chalked ‘No time for love’. You didn’t need reminding in view of their dusty faces and wrestlers’ bodies. But they had hearts as big as their biceps.
Smiling through their catcalls and whistles of derision — where were my hands now that the city needed to be reconstructed? — and waving my walking-stick like a sick-note, I carried on until I came to Pestalozzistrasse where Friedrich Korsch (an old friend from my days with Kripo, and now a Kommissar with Berlin’s Communist-dominated police force) had told me that I could find Emil Becker’s wife.
Number 21 was a damaged five-storey building of basin-flats with paper windows, and inside the front doorway, smelling heavily of burnt toast, was a sign which warned ‘Unsafe Staircase! In use at visitor’s own risk’. Fortunately for me, the names and apartment-numbers that were chalked on the wall inside the door told me that Frau Becker lived on the ground floor.
I walked down a dark, dank corridor to her door. Between it and the landing washbasin an old woman was picking large chunks of fungus off the damp wall and collecting them in a cardboard box.
‘Are you from the Red Cross?’ she asked.
I told her I wasn’t, knocked at the door and waited.
She smiled. ‘It’s all right, you know. We’re really quite well-off here.’ There was a quiet insanity in her voice.
I knocked again, more loudly this time, and heard a muffled sound, and then bolts being drawn on the other side of the door.
‘We don’t go hungry,’ said the old woman. ‘The Lord provides.’ She pointed at her shards of fungus in the box. ‘Look. There are even fresh mushrooms growing here.’ And so saying she pulled a piece of fungus from the wall and ate it.
When the door finally opened, I was momentarily unable to speak from disgust. Frau Becker, catching sight of the old woman, brushed me aside and stepped smartly into the corridor, where with many loud insults she shooed the old woman away.
‘Filthy old baggage,’ she muttered. ‘She’s always coming into this building and eating that mould. The woman’s mad. A complete spinner.’
‘Something she ate no doubt,’ I said queasily.
Frau Becker fixed me with the awl of her bespectacled eye. ‘Now who are you and what do you want?’ she asked brusquely.
‘My name is Bernhard Gunther —’ I started.
‘Heard of you,’ she snapped. ‘You’re with Kripo.’
‘I was.’
‘You’d better come in.’ She followed me into the icy-cold sitting-room, slammed the door shut and closed the bolts as if in mortal fear of something. Noticing how this took me aback, she added by way of explanation: ‘Can’t be too careful these days.’
‘No indeed.’
I looked around at the loathsome walls, the threadbare carpet and the old furniture. It wasn’t much but it was neatly kept. There was little she could have done about the damp.
‘Charlottenburg’s not too badly off,’ I offered by way of mitigation, ‘in comparison with some areas.’
‘Maybe so,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you, if you’d come after dark and knocked till kingdom come, I wouldn’t have answered. We get all sorts of rats round here at night.’ So saying she picked up a large sheet of plywood from off the couch, and for a moment in the gloom of the place I thought she was working on a jigsaw-puzzle. Then I saw the numerous packets of Olleschau cigarette papers, the bags of butts, the piles of salvaged tobacco, and the serried ranks of re-rolls.
I sat down on the couch, took out my Winston and offered her one.
‘Thanks,’ she said grudgingly, and threaded the cigarette behind her ear. ‘I’ll smoke it later.’ But I didn’t doubt that she would sell it with the rest.
‘What’s the going rate for one of those re-cycled nails?’
‘About 5 marks,’ she said. ‘I pay my collectors five US for 150 tips. That rolls about twenty good ones. Sell them for about ten US. What, are you writing an article about it for the Tagesspiegel? Spare me the Victor Gollancz-Save Berlin routine, Herr Gunther. You’re here about that lousy husband of mine, aren’t you? Well, I haven’t seen him in a long while. And I hope I never clap eyes on him again. I expect you know he’s in a Viennese gaol, do you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You may as well know that when the American MPs came to tell me he’d been arrested, I was glad. I could forgive him for deserting me, but not our son.’
There was no telling if Frau Becker had turned witch before or after her husband had jumped his wife’s bail. But on first acquaintance she wasn’t the type to have persuaded me that her absconding husband had made the wrong choice. She had a bitter mouth, prominent lower jaw and small sharp teeth. No sooner had I explained the purpose of my visit than she started to chew the air around my ears. It cost me the rest of my cigarettes to placate her enough to answer my questions.
‘Exactly what happened? Can you tell me?’
‘The MPs said that he shot and killed an American army captain in Vienna. They caught him red-handed apparently. That’s all I was told.’
‘What about this Colonel Poroshin? Do you know anything about him?’
‘You want to know if you can trust him or not. That’s what you want to know. Well, he’s an Ivan,’ she sneered. ‘That’s all you should need to know.’ She shook her head and added, impatiently: ‘Oh, they knew each other here in Berlin because of one of Emil’s rackets. Penicillin, I think it was. Emil said that Poroshin caught syphilis off some girl he was keen on. More like the other way round, I thought. Anyway this was the worst kind of syphilis: the sort that makes you swell up. Salvarsan didn’t seem to work. Emil got them some penicillin. Well, you know how rare that is, the good stuff I mean. That could be one reason why Poroshin’s trying to help Emil. They’re all the same, these Russians. It’s not just their brains that are in their balls. It’s their hearts too. Poroshin’s gratitude comes straight from his scrotum.’
‘And another reason?’
Her brow darkened.
‘You said that could be one reason.’
‘Well of course. It can’t simply be a matter of pulling Poroshin’s tail out of the fire, can it? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Emil had been spying for him.’
‘Got any evidence for that? Did he see much of Poroshin when he was still here in Berlin?’
‘I can’t say he did, I can’t say he didn’t.’
‘But he’s not charged with anything besides murder. He’s not been charged with spying.’
‘What would be the point? They’ve got enough to hang him as it is.’
‘That’s not the way it works. If he had been spying, they would have wanted to know everything. Those American MPs would have asked you a lot of questions about your husband’s associates. Did they?’
She shrugged. ‘Not that I can remember.’
‘If there was any suspicion of spying they would have inve
stigated it, if only to find out what sort of information he might have got hold of. Did they search this place?’
Frau Becker shook her head. ‘Either way, I hope he hangs,’ she said bitterly. ‘You can tell him that if you see him. I certainly won’t.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘A year ago. He came back from a Soviet POW camp in July and he legged it three months later.’
‘And when was he captured?’
‘February 1943, at Briansk.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘To think that I waited three years for that man. All those other men who I turned away. I kept myself for him, and look what happened.’ A thought seemed to occur to her. ‘There’s your evidence for spying, if you need any. How was it that he managed to get himself released, eh? Answer me that. How did he get home when so many others are still there?’
I stood up to leave. Perhaps the situation with my own wife made me more inclined to take Becker’s part. But I had heard enough to realize that he would need all the help he could get — possibly more, if this woman had anything to do with it.
I said: ‘I was in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp myself, Frau Becker. For less time than your husband, as it happens. It didn’t make me a spy. Lucky maybe, but not a spy.’ I went to the door, opened it, and hesitated. ‘Shall I tell you what it did make me? With people like the police, with people like you, Frau Becker, with people like my own wife, who’s hardly let me touch her since I came home. Shall I tell you what it made me? It made me unwelcome.’
6
It is said that a hungry dog will eat a dirty pudding. But hunger doesn’t just affect your standards of hygiene. It also dulls the wits, blunts the memory — not to mention the sex-drive — and generally produces a feeling of listlessness. So it was no surprise to me that there had been a number of occasions during the course of 1947 when, with senses pinched from want of nourishment, I had nearly met with an accident. It was for this very reason I decided to reflect upon my present, rather irrational inclination, which was to take Becker’s case after all, with the benefit of a full stomach.
Formerly Berlin’s finest, most famous hotel, the Adlon was now little more than a ruin. Somehow it remained open to guests, with fifteen available rooms which, because it was in the Soviet sector, were usually taken by Russian officers. A small restaurant not only survived in the basement, but did brisk business too, a result of it being exclusive to Germans with food coupons who might therefore lunch or dine there without fear of being thrown off a table in favour of some more obviously affluent Americans or British, as happened in most other Berlin restaurants.
The Adlon’s improbable entrance was underneath a pile of rubble on Wilhelmstrasse, only a short distance away from the Führerbunker where Hitler had met his death, and which could be toured for the price of a couple of cigarettes in the hand of any one of the policemen who were supposed to keep people out of it. All Berlin’s bulls were doubling as touts since the end of the war.
I ate a late lunch of lentil soup, turnip ‘hamburger’ and tinned fruit; and having sufficiently turned over Becker’s problem in my metabolized mind, I handed over my coupons and went up to what passed for the hotel reception desk to use the telephone.
My call to the Soviet Military Authority, the SMA, in Karlshorst was connected quickly enough, but I seemed to wait forever to be put through to Colonel Poroshin. Nor did speaking in Russian speed the progress of my call; it merely earned me a look of suspicion from the hotel porter. When finally I got through to Poroshin he seemed genuinely pleased that I had changed my mind and told me that I should wait by the picture of Stalin on Unter den Linden, where his staff car would collect me in fifteen minutes.
The afternoon had turned as raw as a boxer’s lip and I stood in the door of the Adlon for ten minutes before heading back up the small service stairs and towards the top of the Wilhelmstrasse. Then, with the Brandenburg Gate at my back, I walked up to the house-sized picture of the Comrade Chairman that dominated the centre of the avenue, flanked by two smaller plinths, each bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle.
As I waited for the car, Stalin seemed to watch me, a sensation which, I supposed, was intended: the eyes were as deep, black and unpleasant as the inside of a postman’s boot, and under the cockroach moustaches the smile was hard permafrost. It always amazed me that there were people who referred to this murdering monster as ‘Uncle’ Joe: he seemed to me to be about as avuncular as King Herod.
Poroshin’s car arrived, its engine drowned by the noise of a squadron of YAK 3 fighters passing overhead. I climbed aboard, and rolled helplessly in the back seat as the broad-shouldered, Tatar-faced driver hit the BMW’s accelerator, sending the car speeding east towards Alexanderplatz, and beyond to the Frankfurter Allee and Karlshorst.
‘I always thought that German civilians were forbidden to ride in staff cars,’ I said to the driver in Russian.
‘True,’ he said, ‘but the colonel said that if we are stopped I’m just to say that you’re being arrested.’
The Tatar laughed uproariously at my look of obvious alarm, and I could only console myself with the fact that while we were driving at such a speed, it was unlikely that we could be stopped by anything other than an anti-tank gun.
We reached Karlshorst minutes later.
A villa colony with a steeplechase course, Karlshorst, nicknamed ‘the little Kremlin’, was now a completely isolated Russian enclave which Germans could only enter by special permit. Or the kind of pennant on the front of Poroshin’s car. We were waved through several checkpoints and finally drew up alongside the old St Antonius Hospital on Zeppelin Strasse now housing the SMA for Berlin. The car ground to a halt in the shadow of a five-metre-high plinth on top of which was a big red Soviet star. Poroshin’s driver sprang out of his seat, opened my door smartly and, ignoring the sentries, squired me up the steps to the front door. I paused in the doorway for a moment, surveying the shiny new BMW cars and motorcycles in the car park.
‘Someone been shopping?’ I said.
‘From the BMW factory at Eisenbach,’ said my driver proudly. ‘Now Russian.’
With this depressing thought he left me in a waiting-room that smelled strongly of carbolic. The room’s only concession to decoration was another picture of Stalin with a slogan underneath that read: ‘Stalin, the wise teacher and protector of the working people’. Even Lenin, portrayed in a smaller frame alongside the wise one, seemed from his expression to have one or two problems with that particular sentiment.
I met these same two popular faces hanging on the wall of Poroshin’s office on the top floor of the SMA building. The young colonel’s neatly pressed olive-brown tunic was hanging on the back of the glass door, and he was wearing a Circassian-style shirt, belted with a black strap. But for the polish on his soft calf-leather boots he might have passed for a student at Moscow University. He set down his mug and stood up from behind his desk as the Tatar ushered me into his office.
‘Sit down, please, Herr Gunther,’ said Poroshin, pointing at a bentwood chair. The Tatar waited to be dismissed. Poroshin lifted his mug and held it up for my inspection. ‘Would you like some Ovaltine, Herr Gunther?’
‘Ovaltine? No, thanks, I hate the stuff.’
‘Do you?’ He sounded surprised. ‘I love it.’
‘It’s kind of early to be thinking of going to bed, isn’t it?’
Poroshin smiled patiently. ‘Perhaps you would prefer some vodka.’ He pulled open his desk drawer and took out a bottle and a glass, which he placed on the desk in front of me.
I poured myself a large one. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Tatar rub his thirst with the back of his paw. Poroshin saw it too. He filled another glass and laid it on the filing cabinet so that it was immediately next to the man’s head.
‘You have to train these Cossack bastards like dogs,’ he explained. ‘For them drunkenness is an almost religious ordinance. Isn’t that so, Yeroshka?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said blankly.
&nb
sp; ‘He smashed a bar up, assaulted a waitress, punched a sergeant, and but for me he might have been shot. Still might be shot, eh, Yeroshka? The minute you touch that glass without my permission. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Poroshin produced a big, heavy revolver and laid it on the desk to emphasize his point. Then he sat down again.
‘I imagine you know quite a lot about discipline with your record, Herr Gunther? Where did you say you served during the war?’
‘I didn’t say.’
He leaned back in his chair and swung his boots on to the desk. The vodka trembled over the edge of my glass as they thudded down on the blotter.
‘No, you didn’t, did you? But I imagine that with your qualifications you would have served in some Intelligence capacity.’
‘What qualifications?’
‘Come now, you’re being too modest. Your spoken Russian, your experience with Kripo. Ah yes, Emil’s lawyer told me about that. I’m told that you and he were once part of the Berlin Murder Commission. And you a Kommissar, too. That’s quite senior, isn’t it?’
I sipped my vodka and tried to keep calm. I told myself that I ought to have expected something like this.
‘I was just an ordinary soldier, obeying orders,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even a Party member.’
‘So few were, it would now seem. I find that really quite remarkable.’ He smiled and raised a salutary index finger. ‘Be as coy as you like Herr Gunther, but I shall find out about you. Mark my words. If only to satisfy my curiosity.’
‘Sometimes curiosity is a bit like Yeroshka’s thirst,’ I said, ‘— best left unsatisfied. Unless it’s the disinterested, intellectual kind of curiosity that belongs properly to the philosophers. Answers have a habit of disappointing.’ I finished the glass and laid it on the blotter next to his boots. ‘But I didn’t come here with a cipher in my socks to play your afternoon’s vexed question, Colonel. So how about you feed me with one of those Lucky Strikes you were smoking this morning and satisfy my curiosity at least as far as telling me one or two facts about this case?’
